http://john-ross.net/betrayal.htm
ROSS IN RANGE
The Betrayal and Redemption of an American Icon, or
Smith & Wesson and the Springfield Sledgehammer
By John Ross
Copyright 2003 by John Ross. Electronic reproduction of this article freely permitted provided it is reproduced in its entirety with attribution given.
For over a century, Smith and Wesson, the Springfield, Massachusetts gunmaker, has been known for producing some of the world’s finest handguns. Devotees of the marque are many, and I have been one since before I needed to shave. There are also some shooters and gun collectors who refuse to buy any firearm made by the company, now and forever. Those people should change their minds right now. Some background:
My life changed the morning of my 14th birthday on June 17, 1971, when my uncle came over and picked me up for a day of shooting. He was the kind of relative every kid should have in his life at least once: Tall, powerfully built, smart, exciting, generous, and wealthy. We often went to the range together to shoot target rifles, but on this day we went to the riverbank to pop driftwood with some handguns that he brought along. I owned a .22 Smith & Wesson revolver that my late father had given me which I was good with, and I’d shot my uncle’s .38s before, but today he brought something bigger.
My uncle opened a zippered case and handed me a gleaming blued steel .357 Magnum, a 5"-barreled Smith & Wesson Model 27, the one built on the N-Series frame, their largest frame size. I loaded it from a box of ammo he’d set out, put on my earmuffs, and began to try my skill with the big gun. My uncle began shooting the .45 he had carried in WWII.
There’d been a big storm up north the night before, and the river was filled with branches and other pieces of wood floating by. Soon we were both making sticks jump in the water. The .357 I was using fired a lighter bullet than his .45, but at a much higher velocity. The splash it made was a little bit bigger, and that threw the driftwood farther in the air, which I liked.
Different people with different eyes and hands will need different sight settings when shooting the same handgun. It had taken me two cylinders to figure out exactly where the .357 would hit for me using a center hold: an inch high and slightly to the left at ten yards. After I figured that out, I made the driftwood hop regularly. My uncle got a big kick out of the good time I was having, and when I finished the box of 50 rounds, he handed me another gun and said, "You’re doing pretty well with that--try this one."
It looked like the .357 I’d been shooting, but with a longer and thicker barrel. It was a .44 Magnum, the Model 29. I had read about them (endlessly) but had never seen one in the flesh. I knew they were very hard to get, as S&W didn’t produce many under the best of circumstances, and with semiauto pistol production at the Springfield plant cranked up for the Vietnam War, new or like-new 29s were so scarce they were bringing twice the suggested retail. "See what you think," he told me. I loaded it and took a firm two-handed grip, making sure the web of my right hand was high up on the backstrap. I’d read of the heavy recoil, but couldn’t believe it would be more painful than some other things I did, like playing football.
It wasn’t. The gun came back hard, but it only stung a little bit, and the results were spectacular. Unlike the .357, the sights on this gun were set just right for me. At about 25 feet, the first shot hit right where the sights were aligned, on the bottom edge of a foot-long piece of driftwood. A geyser of water sent the wood spinning fifteen feet in the air. My uncle let out a whoop, and shot at the wood as soon as it landed. He hit it in the middle and broke it, but the pieces only jumped a few inches off the water. (You have to hit right under a floating object to really kick it in the air. Tens of thousands of .22 rounds on the river had taught me this.)
I took aim at the larger of the two pieces and sent it even higher than before. While it was in the air, I had time to re-cock the gun and aim it where the wood was going to land. As soon as it hit the water I sent it on its way again, four times in a row.
The effect that my shooting performance had on my uncle was all out of proportion to the skill involved, and when I tried to hand the gun back to him, he insisted I finish the rest of the box. I started shooting targets that were farther and farther away, holding up more front sight as I had done so many times with my .22 revolver. My uncle, an accomplished competitive bullseye shooter, had never practiced shooting at ranges farther than 50 yards with a handgun. I had, a lot. When I connected with a floating gallon can at over 100 yards and it filled with water and sank, my uncle swore in surprise. A little while later, when he shot a piece of wood out of the water and threw it some six feet in the air, I hit it at the top of its arc and split it in two in midair. It was partly luck, but the wood was only about fifteen feet away, so it wasn’t all that amazing that I hit it. My uncle, though, was stunned. "Jee-sus Kee-rist! I should have gotten you a .44 a long time ago!"
When I handed the gun back to him he wouldn’t take it. He told me it was my birthday present, and when I protested, he threatened to throw it in the river if I kept arguing with him. I shut my mouth quickly.
After shooting we ate lunch, and my uncle and I discussed the history of the guns we’d been using. The .357 Magnum had been introduced in 1935 by Smith & Wesson as a logical response to the handloaders and experimenters who had been loading their own extra-heavy .38 Special ammunition in Smith & Wesson’s heavy-framed revolvers. S&W brought out a new round 1/10 inch longer (so it wouldn’t fit in small, weak .38 Special guns that were owned by millions of people), loaded it to high pressure, and called it the .357 Magnum, which was the actual bullet diameter of the .38 revolver rounds.
I knew all this from reading books on arms development. What I did not know was that in 1935, some people criticized S&W, saying "no one except the police" needed such a powerful handgun. An editorial in the NRA magazine American Rifleman actually took this stance, and my uncle said it prompted many outdoorsmen to write in protest. The .357 was mainstream in 1971, but in 1935 it had been cutting edge to the general public.
I knew from my reading that handloaders had been souping up not only the .38 Special long before S&W introduced the .357, they had been doing the same thing with the .44 Special in S&W’s strong N-frame guns since at least as far back as 1926*, creating loads much more powerful than the new .357. My uncle told me that the .357 sold very well in 1935, and it had been hard to get one then. The heavy-loaded .44 Special was cheaper and readily available, but you had to assemble your own ammunition to get the most out of it.
Two decades later, history repeated itself, and Smith & Wesson introduced the .44 Magnum, with a case 1/10 inch longer than the Special and loaded by the factories to a pressure of 40,000 PSI. It was about 20% more powerful than the hot .44 Special loads that savvy handloaders had been assembling for over a quarter-century, and the Model 29 was heavily advertised as The World’s Most Powerful Handgun. Of course, as small-minded people are wont to do, some of the public turned up their noses and proclaimed that no one needed such a gun, since they themselves had no use for one.
The gun that I fired that day had been made thirteen years before, in 1958, the third year of production. It had a high polish and the beautiful milk-blue finish that graced many of Smith & Wesson’s magnums of that period. Over the years I would acquire many other Smith .44s, but none were any nicer or noticeably more accurate than my first one. In 1958, Smith & Wesson had been a family-owned company for over a century. In 1965 they were bought by the South American conglomerate Bangor Punta, and quality became a bit problematic. Occasionally a gun with bad build quality would slip through, but in my experience the company would always make it right.
In the ensuing months, when he saw how much I was shooting the one I had, my uncle gave me two more Model 29s, bought three more for himself, and purchased for us a progressive loader capable of producing 600 rounds of ammunition per hour so that we could both shoot our .44s more without me spending all my free time making ammo for them. My uncle died of a heart attack in 1976, five years after I first shot the birthday .44 on the river. By the time of his death we had, between the two of us, fired over 40,000 rounds of ammunition through our big Smith & Wessons. I've kept at it since then, and today my total .44 expenditure is over 110,000 rounds.
The Springfield company came under new ownership again in the early 1980s, and in 1987 was purchased by the British conglomerate Tompkins PLC. Under Tompkins, S&W gradually instituted more modern CNC machining equipment, and in my opinion build quality, if not surface finish, eventually came to rival the best work the company had ever produced.
Nothing bad happened under Tompkins ownership until the United States got an administration that was both Socialist and rabidly anti-freedom. Here is where the story gets interesting.
continued on next post....
ROSS IN RANGE
The Betrayal and Redemption of an American Icon, or
Smith & Wesson and the Springfield Sledgehammer
By John Ross
Copyright 2003 by John Ross. Electronic reproduction of this article freely permitted provided it is reproduced in its entirety with attribution given.
For over a century, Smith and Wesson, the Springfield, Massachusetts gunmaker, has been known for producing some of the world’s finest handguns. Devotees of the marque are many, and I have been one since before I needed to shave. There are also some shooters and gun collectors who refuse to buy any firearm made by the company, now and forever. Those people should change their minds right now. Some background:
My life changed the morning of my 14th birthday on June 17, 1971, when my uncle came over and picked me up for a day of shooting. He was the kind of relative every kid should have in his life at least once: Tall, powerfully built, smart, exciting, generous, and wealthy. We often went to the range together to shoot target rifles, but on this day we went to the riverbank to pop driftwood with some handguns that he brought along. I owned a .22 Smith & Wesson revolver that my late father had given me which I was good with, and I’d shot my uncle’s .38s before, but today he brought something bigger.
My uncle opened a zippered case and handed me a gleaming blued steel .357 Magnum, a 5"-barreled Smith & Wesson Model 27, the one built on the N-Series frame, their largest frame size. I loaded it from a box of ammo he’d set out, put on my earmuffs, and began to try my skill with the big gun. My uncle began shooting the .45 he had carried in WWII.
There’d been a big storm up north the night before, and the river was filled with branches and other pieces of wood floating by. Soon we were both making sticks jump in the water. The .357 I was using fired a lighter bullet than his .45, but at a much higher velocity. The splash it made was a little bit bigger, and that threw the driftwood farther in the air, which I liked.
Different people with different eyes and hands will need different sight settings when shooting the same handgun. It had taken me two cylinders to figure out exactly where the .357 would hit for me using a center hold: an inch high and slightly to the left at ten yards. After I figured that out, I made the driftwood hop regularly. My uncle got a big kick out of the good time I was having, and when I finished the box of 50 rounds, he handed me another gun and said, "You’re doing pretty well with that--try this one."
It looked like the .357 I’d been shooting, but with a longer and thicker barrel. It was a .44 Magnum, the Model 29. I had read about them (endlessly) but had never seen one in the flesh. I knew they were very hard to get, as S&W didn’t produce many under the best of circumstances, and with semiauto pistol production at the Springfield plant cranked up for the Vietnam War, new or like-new 29s were so scarce they were bringing twice the suggested retail. "See what you think," he told me. I loaded it and took a firm two-handed grip, making sure the web of my right hand was high up on the backstrap. I’d read of the heavy recoil, but couldn’t believe it would be more painful than some other things I did, like playing football.
It wasn’t. The gun came back hard, but it only stung a little bit, and the results were spectacular. Unlike the .357, the sights on this gun were set just right for me. At about 25 feet, the first shot hit right where the sights were aligned, on the bottom edge of a foot-long piece of driftwood. A geyser of water sent the wood spinning fifteen feet in the air. My uncle let out a whoop, and shot at the wood as soon as it landed. He hit it in the middle and broke it, but the pieces only jumped a few inches off the water. (You have to hit right under a floating object to really kick it in the air. Tens of thousands of .22 rounds on the river had taught me this.)
I took aim at the larger of the two pieces and sent it even higher than before. While it was in the air, I had time to re-cock the gun and aim it where the wood was going to land. As soon as it hit the water I sent it on its way again, four times in a row.
The effect that my shooting performance had on my uncle was all out of proportion to the skill involved, and when I tried to hand the gun back to him, he insisted I finish the rest of the box. I started shooting targets that were farther and farther away, holding up more front sight as I had done so many times with my .22 revolver. My uncle, an accomplished competitive bullseye shooter, had never practiced shooting at ranges farther than 50 yards with a handgun. I had, a lot. When I connected with a floating gallon can at over 100 yards and it filled with water and sank, my uncle swore in surprise. A little while later, when he shot a piece of wood out of the water and threw it some six feet in the air, I hit it at the top of its arc and split it in two in midair. It was partly luck, but the wood was only about fifteen feet away, so it wasn’t all that amazing that I hit it. My uncle, though, was stunned. "Jee-sus Kee-rist! I should have gotten you a .44 a long time ago!"
When I handed the gun back to him he wouldn’t take it. He told me it was my birthday present, and when I protested, he threatened to throw it in the river if I kept arguing with him. I shut my mouth quickly.
After shooting we ate lunch, and my uncle and I discussed the history of the guns we’d been using. The .357 Magnum had been introduced in 1935 by Smith & Wesson as a logical response to the handloaders and experimenters who had been loading their own extra-heavy .38 Special ammunition in Smith & Wesson’s heavy-framed revolvers. S&W brought out a new round 1/10 inch longer (so it wouldn’t fit in small, weak .38 Special guns that were owned by millions of people), loaded it to high pressure, and called it the .357 Magnum, which was the actual bullet diameter of the .38 revolver rounds.
I knew all this from reading books on arms development. What I did not know was that in 1935, some people criticized S&W, saying "no one except the police" needed such a powerful handgun. An editorial in the NRA magazine American Rifleman actually took this stance, and my uncle said it prompted many outdoorsmen to write in protest. The .357 was mainstream in 1971, but in 1935 it had been cutting edge to the general public.
I knew from my reading that handloaders had been souping up not only the .38 Special long before S&W introduced the .357, they had been doing the same thing with the .44 Special in S&W’s strong N-frame guns since at least as far back as 1926*, creating loads much more powerful than the new .357. My uncle told me that the .357 sold very well in 1935, and it had been hard to get one then. The heavy-loaded .44 Special was cheaper and readily available, but you had to assemble your own ammunition to get the most out of it.
Two decades later, history repeated itself, and Smith & Wesson introduced the .44 Magnum, with a case 1/10 inch longer than the Special and loaded by the factories to a pressure of 40,000 PSI. It was about 20% more powerful than the hot .44 Special loads that savvy handloaders had been assembling for over a quarter-century, and the Model 29 was heavily advertised as The World’s Most Powerful Handgun. Of course, as small-minded people are wont to do, some of the public turned up their noses and proclaimed that no one needed such a gun, since they themselves had no use for one.
The gun that I fired that day had been made thirteen years before, in 1958, the third year of production. It had a high polish and the beautiful milk-blue finish that graced many of Smith & Wesson’s magnums of that period. Over the years I would acquire many other Smith .44s, but none were any nicer or noticeably more accurate than my first one. In 1958, Smith & Wesson had been a family-owned company for over a century. In 1965 they were bought by the South American conglomerate Bangor Punta, and quality became a bit problematic. Occasionally a gun with bad build quality would slip through, but in my experience the company would always make it right.
In the ensuing months, when he saw how much I was shooting the one I had, my uncle gave me two more Model 29s, bought three more for himself, and purchased for us a progressive loader capable of producing 600 rounds of ammunition per hour so that we could both shoot our .44s more without me spending all my free time making ammo for them. My uncle died of a heart attack in 1976, five years after I first shot the birthday .44 on the river. By the time of his death we had, between the two of us, fired over 40,000 rounds of ammunition through our big Smith & Wessons. I've kept at it since then, and today my total .44 expenditure is over 110,000 rounds.
The Springfield company came under new ownership again in the early 1980s, and in 1987 was purchased by the British conglomerate Tompkins PLC. Under Tompkins, S&W gradually instituted more modern CNC machining equipment, and in my opinion build quality, if not surface finish, eventually came to rival the best work the company had ever produced.
Nothing bad happened under Tompkins ownership until the United States got an administration that was both Socialist and rabidly anti-freedom. Here is where the story gets interesting.
continued on next post....
.....and I KNOW I am NOT alone.....
